Lee Jaephil

Awards & Recognitions

• 2025 – Bestphotoaward UK Platinum Award

• 2025 – Social Impact Award

• 2023 – Official Photographer, World Heritage Festival

• 2021 – Selected Project, Regional Culture Promotion Program, Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of Korea

Publications & Series

• 2025 – Ttebae, Walking the Sea (photobook, forthcoming)

  ↳ Editor & Designer of the photobook documenting the traditional flatboat culture in Uljin

• 2024 – Finding Ai Project Photobook

• 2023–Present – Ongoing series “My Old Camera Stories” on Brunch

Solo Exhibition

• 2023 – Finding I, Hello Museum, Seoul, South Korea

Selected Group & Curated Exhibitions

• 2024 – Scenes Swaying in May, Oiljang Project, Daegu, South Korea

• 2023 – Market Photos, Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, South Korea

Winning the BPA was not merely about gaining recognition for a single photograph. Rather, it became a pivotal moment that urged me to revisit questions around love, the shapes of human connection, and the emotional dimensionality of photography as a medium. The image—born from a chance encounter and an impromptu wedding portrait session—crystallised the thoughts I had long been harbouring: how does photography hold emotion? Can memory truly be reassembled through the visual? Since then, I have come to regard photography not just as a tool for documentation, but as an entrance into feeling itself.

This experience has guided me towards new directions in my work. It has fed into the emotional narrative of Finding Ai, and sparked archival projects that bridge local love stories with contemporary perspectives on gender and intimacy. More recently, I have begun preparing a new body of work focused on heritage landscapes—spaces where memory resides not just in architecture, but in the emotional resonance of place. These are not mere records of location, but attempts to reclaim the subtle traces of living, of relationships, and of the fading sensorial textures of the past. The transparent materials, reverse compositions, and temporal displays that I now explore all trace their roots back to that singular image.

The BPA did not offer me closure. It opened a question. And that question continues to echo as I walk through these places of memory—seeking not answers, but the next image to breathe.